Pre-alphabetic

students read words by memorizing their visual features or guessing words from their context

Early Alphabetic

students recognize some letters of the alphabet and can use them together with context to remember words by sight

Later Alphabetic

readers possess extensive working knowledge of the graphophonemic system, and they can use this knowledge to analyze fully the connections between graphemes and phonemes in words; they can decode unfamiliar words and store fully analyzed sight words in memory

Consolidated Alphabetic

students consolidate their knowledge of grapheme-phoneme blends into larger units that recur in different words